 Why did the chicken go to the seance? Why? Well, to get to the other side. Hey, welcome back to our stupid rags of corp. I'm Rick. As we all knew. Aliens' favorite place is the United States. A truly astonishing day where we have a house session openly talking about the existence of UFOs and extraterrestrials and having non-biological life forms and everything else. And just it was another day in the news cycle and everything else. Well, we've been through everything. So, and also, people already just assumed that they were real. Yeah. So, like, it's like, yeah, we know that. We kind of figured. We've known you've been doing that for decades. So thanks for finally also telling us the truth. The universe is infinite. It's kind of big. So it'd be actually more illogical to assume that we are alone. Like, you know, in terms of like the probability, how unprobable that is that we, out of the curchillian, curbilian, gordillian, whatever the number is of galaxies, planets out there and how old. Transcends comprehension. It's like impossible. Transcends. Only once. Like, it's like possible that we, like, there's actually only a few. There's more than likely billions. There's probably infinite amounts of different kinds of life forms that we've yet to discover. It's kind of insane. It's pretty cool. Anyways, but the specific video, how India has created a $11 billion cricket empire. Ah! I know how they did it. They simply played the game. Yes. They played the game and fell in love with it. There you go. Don't need to watch the video. Yes. That's the explanation. Although this is going to be interesting because, while we know Diddly Squad, I have talked to folks that have very strong opinions about good things that have happened in Indian cricket and bad things that have had happen. And some people who, for example, love IPL, some people who detest IPL. Why? You're talking to the person who doesn't really understand all the ins and outs of it. Anyways, here we go. Everything you think you know about cricket. Wow. I still know exactly what I knew before. This is the Indian Premier League. It's the fastest growing sports league in the world, ahead of the NFL, the NBA, MLB, and English Premier League. That was Ohtani. Future Dodger. It's worth $2 million. But a single IPL game is worth more than $15 million. He's off the trading block. Oh, that's. Yeah, there was no way the angels were going to trade them. Cricket phenomenon that runs for two months with 10 franchises, 74 matches, and more than 500 million viewers. And unlike the other big sports leagues, the NFL, NBA, and Formula One, they probably knew they wouldn't get caught using the emblem. Only started in 2008. So how did India build this juggernaut? Back in 2007, cricket had diehard fans. But attracting new viewers and investment still had to struggle. Look on. Test cricket took five whole days per match. That's a long time. Even the shorter version, the one day international, lasted seven to eight hours. But in 2003, England introduced a fast-paced version of cricket called T20. In T20 cricket, each match takes about two and a half hours, similar to the time span of other popular team sports. And it became an instant hit. Let's get very good. After India won the 2007 International T20 World Cup, Lalit Modi, the vice president of the board for the control of cricket in India, saw an opportunity to kill a few birds with one stone. See, Modi had a few problems. The new, absurd Indian cricket league threatened BCCI's authority and started poaching big players. It needed to be crushed. Modi had also seen the success of huge franchise models in the US. And wondered why they didn't have a similar money-making cricket franchise, especially in India, where cricket is more like a religion than a sport. So Modi pulled the trigger. And in 2008, the Indian Premier League was founded, a T20 cricket league with eight teams that would be played over just two fast-paced months. New teams were created to play in a franchise format and auctioned off to new owners on January 24, 2000, a total of $724 million, with each team based on a different Indian city. It wasn't just a shorter format that the IPL committed to. The organizers went all in on entertainment. They made it into a spectacle. And the old-fashioned traditionalists find this evolve. To them, that's not cricket. Cricket is theater, where you have intellectual discussions as to where the ball is played and so on and so forth. Here, they said, no, no, you don't need all that. You want entertainment. You want to rival what the cinema offers you, what any other form of entertainment offers you. This translated into instant success. In their first season, the league garnered almost 1.2 billion viewers and made more than $100 million in revenue. This was a more than 20x increase in viewership. Historically, the old format of cricket had struggled to get 50 million viewers. Become something which is more sold as a product, has more things going on for the viewer when they come to the ground. Well, and remember the Indian cricket league? It closed after 2008, Modi won. There is one simple reason that the IPL is a money-making machine audience. India has a population of 1.4 billion that will soon overtake China for the largest in the world. Already did. And also it's one of the fastest-growing middle classes. That means lots of eyeballs and lots of potential ad revenue. Young people as well. India is going to be, for decades to come, the leader in Asia. Yeah. That includes league-wide sponsorship. China, you heard about? Well, yeah. Sorry. The League Central Media Rights Agreement with broadcasters like Star India. In 2022, those rights were sold for over $6 billion. $3 billion came from Disney-owned Star India for TV rights. And another $3 billion came from Viacom 18 for streaming rights. Split across just 74 matches. There's an NFL team that just sold $4 billion, $6 billion. Just one team. And as views rise, the BCCI can charge more and more to the broadcasters who will make more on their side from increased ad sales and subscriptions from a bigger audience. That's why the IPL is such a big deal. It combines an exciting format of a popular sport in a country that has an exploding population. And it's not just India. In 2020, the IPL began broadcasting to more than 120 countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, and South Africa. This also means that the franchises make a lot of money. BCCI keeps only 50% from the media rights deal. The other 50% is split between just 10 franchises. Oh, wow. An average-actile match averages 30,000 people in attendance. This allows ticket sales to account for just 50% of each team's revenue. Rounding out each team's revenue pie chart are individual team sponsorships, merchandise, and prize money. Baths, bales, headgear, and team kits. Everything is sponsored, with some franchises like the Chennai Super Kings making a lot more from sponsors because they have a bigger fan base. There's a powerful virtuous cycle here. By playing the most exciting format and garnering the largest audiences, the IPL makes the most money, which means they attract the best players. Superstar Virat Kohli's salary and winnings for 2019 were just $4 million as he played to the Royal Challengers of Bangalore. But his IPL stardom allowed him to bank an extra $21 million through endorsements. This led the IPL to bring in international stars like A.B. DeVillers, David Warner, and Chris Gale to join up. But all these factors and the big money led to tensions. Test cricket was traditionally more respected than T20 cricket. The classic cricket format was the ultimate test of a player over five days. The IPL money was turning heads. In 2007, only half of players said they'd still reject a national contract to play T20 cricket. And as the IPL drew more viewers, players, and broadcasters, real discussions began about whether test cricket would be reduced to just a few big countries. It seemed like the IPL was gonna crush everything in its way. Even when COVID hit, despite stadiums losing out on ticket revenue, there were still millions and millions of TV viewers. The franchise values doubled in 2020. And the success of the T20 League in India got people hungry for more. IPL franchise owners are now looking to buy T20 cricket franchises in other countries like South Africa. In Canada, clearly. And to replicate the IPL's success. Leagues had started in the Caribbean, Australia, Pakistan, and other countries. It also arrived in the US as a major league cricket. The growth of the Indian Premier League has been insane. In 2009, one year after its founding, the average IPL franchise was valued at $67 million. 14 years later, the value of those franchises has exploded to more than $1.1 billion. That's an annualized growth rate of 24%. Gee whiz, wow. In the past 13 years, the growth rate of NBA teams has been 16%, and NFL teams has been 10%. And the IPL isn't slowing down. Who knows if those leagues outside of India will be successful? But you can feel confident that the IPL will continue to grow in popularity and the nation of India will also continue to succeed. Check out our past video breaking down why the nation of India is poised to win the 21st century. Great video, informative. It's just, I think we've seen a couple other videos kind of explaining similar things, right? But it's just, it's a smart, even though I know there's probably cricket purists out there that just like there's baseball purists in terms of they don't. That don't like the changes. They don't like the changes of people wanting the game to be faster and more entertaining. Cause obviously that's not how it originally was and it's understandable. But also there's something we said, the average viewer wants stuff happening and they want it in a short timeframe so they can enjoy it. Cause people don't have, in today's where everything is a billion dollars to, you go outside and you spend a hundred dollars, they need it quick because they got families, they got work, they can't be there for the three days that it requires for the traditional cricket style. So they like every other sports league takes two to three hours usually to play. And so in the NFL format, which is probably the most profitable in terms of each team making a ton of money in the world, even more than soccer just because there's so many soccer leagues and everything like that. But in terms of just what the owners make in NFL, I think it's probably I believe the most in the world. And I'd be interested to see the other video about why India will win the 21st century because one of the reasons it's going to win the 21st century is because it's not just the population growth, it's demographics. India is so young, I just read an article this morning about how Japan's population went down 800,000 this past year and their population like China, different reasons is aging and they're going to soon reach a place where they have more people not working than those people working. It's worse for China, partly because of their one child policy that they did for years. China's future is very, very bad in terms of the workforce and retirement age and the population that's following. Whereas India is poised to become just the sky's the limit for India. Yeah. So it's yeah, it's super interesting. And I hope that the league, because we wanted to go to some of the games while they were here. We did, yeah. That's like going from Mumbai to Kolkata where they're playing in Texas. Yeah. From where we are. So it's not like we could just drive over there real quick like we did for Comic-Con. In addition to the fact that we don't really want to give a lot of revenue to Texas. No. Not a lot. So I did that for plenty of years. Yeah. I understand they have to grow it they have to justify a fan base. It would suck to start off your league and be paying all the teams to travel around the United States and you only get 2000 people to fill a 40,000 stadium. Also, why aren't the stadiums bigger, like 30,000? That doesn't seem like a lot for as popular and as many people are in India. You think you'd have like 80 to 100,000. You would, but my suspicion is they want to, they want to keep it intimate. Like an NBA game. Even baseball, baseball is still pretty intimate. But depending on where you're sitting, but India is not intimate. No, I'm talking about it. I thought you were talking about the stadiums here. Okay. Yeah. Gotcha. How big was the stadium in Mumbai that we went to? It felt like it was big. Yeah, but like the one that they should, and I know they probably have bigger ones, but they said 30,000. Most NFL stadiums are 60 to 90,000. Yeah. And is there anyone other, because I know Dallas can hold 100. Yeah. Well, that, I think, Can LA's new stadium hold that? I think it can. I think it can. Yeah. I think Atlanta's can, because it- Most baseball stadiums are between 40 and 50,000? Yeah. Max seating? Maybe the newer ones probably. Because also that's one of the things, like if they're building a new stadium, they want to play concerts there. They want to play other sports there. They want the World Cup to be there. So it's like this whole new thing. Anytime they build a stadium, they want the Super Bowl to be there. It'll be interesting to see what happened here in this first year of Major League Cricket in America, and how many die-hard cricket fans are gonna travel to Texas. Obviously, I think the end game is gonna be, they want a full league, and people are gonna travel city to city. I mean, teams will travel city to city, but it's, yeah, that was, I remember that was the thing. The purists don't like IPL. And they said that part of the grandeur of the game among many things is the fact that it's not a sprint, it's a marathon, and that plays into like a seven-game series for the World Series. It's not a best of three. There's a reason. It's because if you can endure that long and handle the stress for that many days in a row, it adds a new level of what it means to be a champion. They changed the wild card for America. They sure did. It's just one game. They sure did. And they shortened the other seasons as well. And the new rules that a lot of people, yours truly included, I wasn't really too hip to the pitch clock idea, but it works. And they tested it out the right way in the minors first. But the, I get the purists, because obviously you don't want the game to change. You want it to stay the same, but also your game needs to evolve or it's going to die. That's just how it is. And people aren't watching, your sport is going to die. It's like every sport that I'm aware of evolved. I mean, if you look at the origin of any sport, whether it's basketball, football, baseball, golf, cricket, rugby, Australian rules, football, they aren't what they were when they started. They just evolve and change with the times. And that's so definitely not what it was. So many new rules, which are not always good. I'm saying all changes. Yeah, not all changes are good. That's why they've gone back on certain things and they still need to change some things. Yeah, constantly growing. But anyways, if you have any thoughts about this, obviously you'll have more thoughts than we do. Please let us know what those are down below.